Senior Data Engineer: Real-Time Streams, Kafka & Temporal

Infinitive; Illinois; On-site; USD 90,000 - 154,000; Full time

Job summary

Infinitive is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to design, build, and scale event-driven data platforms. You will bridge streaming with workflow orchestration, enforcing robust data contracts and quality across distributed systems using Kafka, Temporal, and modern data tooling.

You will design batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines with Python, Spark, and cloud data warehouses, collaborating with engineers and analysts to ensure reliable, scalable data delivery.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in data engineering, backend distributed systems, or software engineering.
• Hands-on experience with Temporal (or Cadence): durable workflows, retries and long-running orchestration.
• Deep expertise with Apache Kafka: partitioning, consumer groups, offset management, topic design.

Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and maintain high-volume distributed data streams using Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect.
• Establish and enforce schema design standards and automated validation to maintain data contracts.
• Coordinate durable workflows using Temporal to manage cross-system ETL tasks.
• Build end-to-end batch and near-real-time pipelines with Python, SQL, Spark.
• Design and optimize analytical data models in modern cloud data warehouses/lakehouses.
• Implement automated testing, schema validation, data quality checks, and observability across workflows.
• Collaborate with software engineers, ML engineers, and analysts on data contracts and CI/CD patterns.

Skills

Data engineering

Temporal

Apache Kafka

Python

SQL

Spark

Data modeling

Tools

Schema Registry

Great Expectations

dbt tests

Pydantic

Avro

Protobuf

JSON Schema

Job description

Infinitive is seeking an experienced Data Engineer to design, build, and scale event-driven data platforms. You will bridge streaming with workflow orchestration, enforcing robust data contracts and quality across distributed systems using Kafka, Temporal, and modern data tooling.

You will design batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines with Python, Spark, and cloud data warehouses, collaborating with engineers and analysts to ensure reliable, scalable data delivery.